Environmentally, there may be hope for us yet

Now I know why I’ve been seeing less people walking around clutching their water bottles as if they were exiles in the desert.

“Sales of bottled water have fallen for the first time in at least five years, assailed by wrathful environmentalists and budget-conscious consumers who have discovered that tap water is practically free.” reports the Washington Post.

Eureka!

Hopefully, more folks will get the message. According to Food & Water Watch, more than 17 million barrels of oil — enough to fuel 1 million cars for a year– are needed to produce the plastic water bottles sold in the United States annually. And about 86 percent of the empty bottles get thrown into the trash rather than recycled.

Encouraging on a global level is a new Stanford University study suggesting “five out of 10 global ecosystems once threatened by overfishing” — one of them off the West coast — “are on the mend.”

“This improvement might well be a reflection of the call to arms that has gone out over the last five to 10 years about the state of the ocean and its needs,said Stephen Palumbi, director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station.

The study, published in the July 31 issue of Science magazine (subscription required), is summarized by Stanford News Service here.